Inside Season 2: Memory of a Killer Enters Darker, More Complex Territory

Angelo’s (Patrick Dempsey) worlds collide in the Memory of a Killer finale, and let’s just say that we really needed a Season 2 after the way it ends. (Good thing it was renewed!) Warning: Spoilers for the Memory of a Killer Season 1 finale ahead!

Grant (Gina Torres), revealed to be the Ferryman, remains determined to make Angelo pay for killing her son — he thought Parks was just another bad guy who was his target, but he’d been lied to — and that culminates in Nicky (Michaela McManus), who’d been forced to work for Gina via blackmail about the abusive husband she killed, being killed and the FBI agent and hitman facing off. Joe (Richard Harmon), having heard about Angelo’s family during his conversation with Grant, is willing to sacrifice himself for him and ends up in the hospital … where, while out of it, he mentions a “daughter” to Dutch (Michael Imperioli), who’s been in the dark about his friend’s other life.

Angelo kills Grant, but not before she warns him that his nightmare isn’t over — and in the final moments, he realizes what she meant when his daughter, Maria (Odeya Rush), shows up at his hitman persona’s apartment, with a file with his victims that the FBI agent sent her.

Below, co-showrunner Aaron Zelman breaks down the Season 1 finale and teases what will happen in Season 2. [Note: The interview was conducted before the series was renewed.]

So the last thing that Angelo always wanted has happened. Maria seems to know the truth about his double life, or at least parts of it. Talk about ending the season on that note. Was that always part of Grant’s plan?

Aaron Zelman: Yeah, great question. So Grant’s plan has always been … We think of her as a bit of an improviser, but her plan was really just to destabilize Angelo in any way she possibly could. So that involves what we refer to in the writers’ room sometimes as Cape Fearing him as a verb, meaning to get him thinking he was … To sort of terrorize him. And so anything from shooting at his daughter, which happens in the pilot, to later on when she has Nicky actually get information from his doctor about his Alzheimer’s and then use that information to make him feel like he’s losing his mind more than he actually is. So these are all part of Grant’s plan to destabilize him. And yeah, in her mind, the final step of that was to expose his double life to his family if — Well, probably both, kill him and do that. She couldn’t kill him, but it looks like she did expose him.

 

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Angelo has to plan so much with his double life. So has he planned for this day when Maria would find out? What can you say about what we could see next there?

Oh, interesting question. Absolutely, you’re right. He’s lived decades with this double life, all Maria’s life, really. So he’s got lots of tricks up his sleeves and he’s got lots of plans. But at the same time, we don’t want the audience to experience a takeback. Oh, we didn’t really mean it when Maria comes in and says, “I got questions for you.” It’s like, no, no, we saw her see those pictures of those dead people, and she’s putting it together. So it’s a real reckoning. It’s not going to be so easy to wiggle out of this one, if that makes sense.

Talk about killing off Grant and Nicky, and in the ways you did. Did you consider keeping either or both alive for Season 2?

Well, I think in our minds, Grant was always going to be the sort of big villain of Season 1. And so we always thought of her that way. In terms of Nicky, we experimented with different things. There was a version in our heads where she was killed off earlier, like in Episode 8 or so. And then we really liked the character, and the actress was wonderful, and we wanted to use more of her, and we wanted to see how — I think everyone’s interested in seeing old doctor what’s his face in a romance a little bit. So we wanted to extend that. It’s not easy for this character to have relationships, so I think he keeps them at a distance to a certain degree, but he certainly didn’t bargain for her death, and that affects him. So we were interested in carrying that line all the way through to the last episode.

Was Grant always going to be the Ferryman, or was anyone else?

Remember, Glenn [Kessler] and I came onto the show as showrunners, really, Episode 4. So Episodes 1 through 3 had been mostly shot. And there were certain decisions we made that we could make because we were able to shoot some stuff for earlier episodes and make sure that — for our purposes and for our thinking, we were most excited by the idea of Grant being the Ferryman. So once we got in there, we made that decision right away, and we were able to go back and make a few adjustments to make sense of that. And then moving forward, of course, it was always in our minds that it was her.

And I mean, Gina was so good as a villain.

Yeah. Isn’t she? I think she’s just such a powerful presence onscreen, but at the same time, there’s a vulnerability to her. It’s this very rare combination of things in an actor, that sort of strength and inner almost rage that you can sense, but at the same time, you kind of feel for her, especially at the end when you realize that it’s her son that Angelo killed and that she’s trying to protect her granddaughter and she has a really close relationship with her granddaughter.

 

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Before Angelo kills Grant, she warns him your nightmare’s just beginning. So what can you say about that? And are there clues throughout Season 1 that hint at what she’s talking about?

Well, I think most directly in our minds, that refers to his killing files being released to his daughter and what that could unleash. And I mean, there is also — now she may have carefully hidden things from the FBI and her colleagues because she’s aware that anything that leads back to Angelo could also lead back to her, and how she manipulated her own people in her orbit to do her bidding to hurt Angelo. So it’s unclear there if she actually does still have leverage and whether she’s dropped a few landmines in the FBI, or if that really refers to more of a personal angle where his daughter now knows who he is and how that’s going to affect his life moving forward. And his family and his daughter have been always such a north star for him, the most important thing to protect. And what happens now when the cat’s out of the bag, and maybe potentially Dutch knows, and so does Joe, that he’s got a daughter out there.

I was going to bring up the Joe knowing and then the Dutch and cluing him in, because that moment is something I’ve been waiting for all season, when is Dutch going to find out? So does Dutch definitively know, or is it just really suspecting at this point?

Well, that’s something for the audience to find out as we go into Season 2. It’s intentionally left a little bit unclear, which is very consistent with the dynamic between those two, between Dutch and Angelo. There’s always a little bit of, can I trust you completely? Are you holding something back from me? Is there something you need to tell me that you’re not telling me? So it’s all part of that dynamic that will continue in Season 2, and you’ll have to tune in to see how it unfolds.

At this point, at the end of Season 1, how would Dutch feel about Angelo keeping him in the dark about his family? Would part of him understand because of the business they’re in?

Well, that’s a good question, too. What would he do? And why is Angelo so afraid of Dutch finding out about this? I mean, I think that’s a really interesting question that Season 2 will explore a little bit further and perhaps even go into their backstory a little bit more like we did in Season 1 with the flashback episode, Episode 5; we intend to do more of that and show maybe there’s a very specific reason why Angelo was so afraid of Dutch finding out about Maria, and it’s not just a sort of vague sense of, oh, he wants to protect her identity as being different from him.

The Angelo that you’ve put forward for Season 1, is this an Angelo that feels like he can ever tell Dutch about his family, or has he completely ruled that out at this point?

In Season 1, he did rule it out for sure. But at this point, going into Season 2, that dynamic, that may change. And especially since Dutch seems to have an inkling that something’s going on, Angelo may decide that it’s best to get ahead of it and tell him. But again, that’s all for viewers to find out in Season 2.

Speaking of going into Season 2, because now there’s this new partnership for Angelo and Dutch with Angelo insisting on vetting the hits. What can you say about that and how does each of them feel about that at the end of the season?

Well, that is the problem. In Season 1, Angelo felt that he was completely lied to and blindsided by Dutch, which is why he didn’t understand that Dr. Parks was not the person he thought he was in terms of being actually a good doctor and not some bioterrorist that he was told that he was. So that’s a really shocking thing for Angelo. I mean, certainly we’ve seen him kill a lot of people, but to target someone to take a hit on someone who’s obviously being set up, or I say obviously that Angelo comes to learn was obviously set up, that’s crossing a line for Angelo that he can’t tolerate. And Season 1 has taught him that. Season 1 has taught him that it’s no longer okay to just say to Dutch, “Hey, what’s my next job? And I do it,” and don’t ask questions. He can’t do that anymore. He can’t let that happen again where he ends up killing another good man. So that’s why he had to make that for himself, for his own internal sense of morality, however skewed that may be for him being a hitman. He decides he can’t tolerate that anymore, now he’s going to have to know more about these hits, and it’s going to be more of a partnership with Dutch. And it’s not just, “Yes, sir, I take orders. I follow orders.”

We saw that Joe doesn’t have it in him to kill, but he did have it in him to be willing to sacrifice himself for Angelo because he has a family. What had you wanted to do with that kind of character in this kind of world this season?

Yeah, I mean, we love this dynamic in this character. We love the character of Joe, we love the actor, and he just really always jumped out at us on screen. We always thought, “God, this guy’s really interesting.” And it starts out as this kind of almost maybe incompetent clown or bordering on incompetent, it’s hard to tell. Certainly, Angelo seems to think he’s not worthy of the job. He tells Dutch that early on in Season 1. But then we were interested in watching this relationship grow and actually that Angelo begins to depend on Joe. And then by the end, he really trusts him. Angelo really trusts him. And there’s also, I think, an obvious mentor-protege, father-son thing going on with the parallel between Angelo having — Well, we’ve learned he killed his own father because his father was so abusive, and Joe’s father, we meet him, and he’s the one who’s also verbally abusive, at least, and kind of a jerk. And so these are two men without fathers, who it’s often the case, those types of men find each other, and they become a support system for each other, and we were very interested in that dynamic.

 

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‘Memory of a Killer’ Season 2: Cast, Premiere Date, More Details

So Dave (Peter Gadiot) essentially gave Angelo a free pass on Bloch. At this point, does he suspect there could be more to Angelo than meets the eye, or does he think that was it and he’s maybe a bit blinded because of his personal relationship with the family?

Dave does not suspect it went any further than just Henry Bloch. And even if it did, there’s a kind of feeling from Dave that he’s really let this family down. He’s put them through the wringer. He didn’t take the threats against Maria seriously enough, and then Earl tried to kill her. So I think he doesn’t have, in our minds, a real interest now in continuing to pursue Angelo. That’s sort of put the bed. But who knows? Some other piece of information might come up that reignites his curiosity.

At this point at the end of Season 1, who would Angelo be comfortable with telling about his Alzheimer’s? Is there anyone?

That does seem to be the most sensitive — well, aside from his identity, which has been sort of forced out of him, his exposure. The other element which seems to be the most sensitive for him is telling anybody about his Alzheimer’s because he’s in a line of work where somebody, as he saw in Episode 5, I mean, when it came to his brother, Dutch found out about it, he’s a major liability and it really is life or death for Angelo, if someone decides that he’s too much of a liability to keep alive. So the secret is really life or death and he’s got to continue keeping it.

What can you say about what else we could see in Season 2?

Well, we’re very interested in the world of Dutch and Angelo, that dynamic. Dutch, Angelo and Joe, we feel a really interesting triangle of characters that we want to lean into more in Season 2. We want to do even more with them and perhaps less on the other side of it, the Hudson Springs side, which we feel to a large degree has been played out. And we also want to bring in some really interesting new characters, which I won’t tell you about now, but that are going to both be interesting new antagonists for Angelo and also reveal more of what’s under the hood, if you will, about the way that Dutch gets these hits and all that, and some jeopardy and stakes also for Dutch going into Season 2, as he becomes a bigger part of this process because they’re partnered now, because Dutch and Angelo are partners, it necessitates Dutch becoming a bigger part of the storytelling and having a bigger role in the hits themselves.

Could we see a rival organization where it’s not personal, but it is just professional that these two organizations do not like each other?

Well, it’s certainly a possibility. There was a little bit of that teased early on in Season 1, and we didn’t really go in that direction so much, but we liked the idea of hinting that there, yes, absolutely, there’s the Bertelettis and these other underground operations that could potentially become threats. I mean, one of the fun things about this world is there’s threats everywhere. There’s threats from the government, from law enforcement, from rival organizations. I mean, that’s what people love about crime thrillers. There’s jeopardy. Everywhere you step is a potential landmine under your foot. So yeah, all of that is still in play and all that is, again, we intend to lean into that aspect of the show as opposed to the sort of suburban life side of it.

Memory of a Killer, Streaming Now, Hulu